


Juez

by Frankettte



Category: Sicario (Movies)
Genre: Alejandro's Backstory, Gen, Graphic descriptions of violence, Minor Character Death, No Kate Macer (Unfortunately), Prequel to Sicario
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 12:38:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16346879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frankettte/pseuds/Frankettte
Summary: Before he became el Sicario, he was el Juez.A character study of Alejandro Gillick and the day his life ended.





	Juez

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to the following prompt.
> 
> "There was nothing left of home. So I walked, and found myself far from where our house once stood."

Flakes rain down from the smouldering sky. Where once had stood a happy house, belonging to a family of three, now loomed a fierce shadow. All that had been now hung in the air, fragmented and lost, like a ghost arriving to its final resting place; forever trapped, and forced to relive the past over and over. The ghosts, a wife and child, would remember the heat. How it raced closer, closer, until it swallowed them whole. Their ashes pollute the air and choke the life out of the man who watches. The home he remembers is gone.

Everything has been striped, consumed, and the flakes drift down onto the perverted remains. The aftermath is severe; the framework splintered, the windows smashed, the ceiling collapsed, crushing the life below it. Each step he takes is like stepping on their skulls, crushing their bones, defiling their memory.

Step – Crunch – Step – Crunch

The man approaches where his front door should be. It’s not there: another casualty. The death count is high, and with each step he takes, everything he pulverises underfoot, it climbs higher and higher. The door bell is lost, buried deep beneath the rubble, along with his beating heart. His wife will have heard the bell ring when Death arrived. He tries to imagine her face; soft and gentle, confused by his arrival. Becoming scared at his insistence. Terrified by his cruelty. Falling sack when it was over.

He should have been there. Comforting her in the aftermath or lying beside her beneath the rubble.

He wants to feel something. Looking at the horrors in front of him, the reality of his life, he should feel something. But his heart is still. His chest is cavernous. There is nothing to do but look and wait. In time this will change. He’ll be so overcome by his loss, his skin will shed and bleed him dry. He will become the house – burning, crumbling, smouldering. Forever haunted by the life before.

Overtime, when new flesh grows back, stretching tightly over this bones, he’ll start to feel something; so intense it chokes and suffocates. It will set him on a new path. It will redesign him. Make him become  _el Sicario_.

He will never be the same he was last night, when he walked through the front door for the last time. Never will he hear his daughter’s laughter. Touch his wife’s hand. Stroke his sweet girl’s hair. Kiss his lover’s lips. Never feel their love or give his back.

The house reverberates the memories of joy that was and destruction that followed. The heat is fading; already a distant memory; but there is more.

He doesn’t stay to find his wife and daughter. Their bones are charred, tacky with burnt flesh, and are laid out on sterile plates. Masked men scrutinise their corpses and search for the truth. They find indentations, lacerations, fractures, breaks. A timeline begins to materialise. The man already knows the tale of how his wife and child found death. He doesn’t need the masked men to tell him how gruesome, how grotesque, how perverted their deaths were. How gang members raided his home, captured his wife, found his child. How they tortured the woman he loved, demanding information. He doesn’t need to know how his wife was butchered alive, limb by limb, how her breasts were hacked off her chest. How her screams echoed throughout the house. Louder and louder. Wetter and wetter, as more was cut off and discharged at their feet. How she bled out slowly...

Drip – Drip – Drip

Cascading down whatever limbs remained and on to the floor.

He had seen the where her blood had pooled; where the fire had scorched and boiled it when he’d walked through their home. He'd stood in the exact stop where his wife had made her final plea, breathed her last breath.

The masked men didn’t say much about his daughter. There was nothing to say. It was self-explanatory, easy to understand. The intruders had not expected to find a child, or even a mother. They had come looking for him, but his absence had changed the game. Some tended to the wife. The rest, who had already sold their souls to the devil, tracked down the child. A huge barrel had been rolled into the front yard. The lid was popped off, as easy as beer, and the child had been thrown in. There had been no screaming. No thrashing. Nothing, except for the tiny bubbles that rose up to the surface...

pop – pop – pop

She hadn’t cried out for her mother when the intruders had discovered her, alone in her bedroom playing with her dolls. They’d snatched her and ran, bypassing her mother, racing downstairs towards the front yard. The child had looked at her killer, a man she did not know, and had wanted his attention. He looks at her, and in confusion at what he sees, stops. He mirrors her frown. She’s shaking a finger between them, side to side, frowning at him. He's feet away from the barrel, and she inches away from death, yet he does not move.

The child makes a different gesture with her hand: moves a pointed finger down from her ear to her mouth. She mouths the word ‘DEAF’. The frown on her killer’s face slips away. His eyes widen at this revelation. He twists away and says something to his accomplices, and she feels his laughter reverberate from deep inside his chest. She joins in with the laughter as he marches forward. She watches as another man pops the top off the barrel. She didn’t have time to peer inside. The gangster throws her into the waiting acid. They watch as her skin, muscle, bone melts before their eyes, and the tiny bubbles that rise to the surface...

pop – pop – pop.                                                                                                                                  

The man already knew how his wife and child died. He did not want the masked men telling him in details. How they’d drained the barrel. How they’d scavenged the debris. How they’d collected, analysed, identified their bodies. He didn’t need confirmation that they were his.

What he needed was to feel something.

At this moment in time, the man sits in a chair, in a motel room, alone somewhere in the world. The walls drip with yellowed tar. An acrid stench fills the space. Dust flutters down from the cracked ceiling, periodically, whenever the man above thrusts hard into the woman he paid for. In the chair he can almost fall asleep. The chair doesn’t burn, suffocate and swallow him whole. The rigid structure is solid. It doesn’t creak, crack or crunch. The only sounds to be heard are the people fucking above, the women outside begging for heroin, and the cars screeching on the highway. Sometimes, when he loses track of time, his soft exhales lull him to sleep.

In - Out - In - Out

When he sleeps he sees them. There is no fire. No acid. No blood. He can feel the warmth of his lover’s lips, her pulse beneath her skin, and the life that flows inside her. He can smell his daughter; remembers her delicate scent on the day see was born. How her hair had smelt when she’d run into his arms and cling to him. Stroke her hair, breath her in.

He daren't open his eyes; Death awaits him, ready to torment.

His eyes snap open at the ringing beside him. His phone shuffles across the grimy surface, illuminated by the unknown number calling. He slowly peels himself away from the chair and slumps over to the phone. He watches it buzz until it stops. He keeps watching… waiting for it to- 

The same unknown number calls back. Again and again.

The couple upstairs are now silent, bedsprings still. The women outside cry softly, denied their fix. The roads are quiet, no one comes or goes.

Eventually, the man picks up the phone.

“Finally! Why don’t you answer your goddamn phone, huh? I’ve been trying to call you! Do you know how fucking long it’s taken me to get your fucking number, huh?” The caller is male, American, and the last person the man wants to listen to, let alone speak to.

“Are you listening to me? Don’t tell me they screwed up and gave me the wrong number! I’ll kill those goddamn idiots-”

“Yes I’m listening.” It’s enough for the caller to shut up. There’s a long pause between the man and the caller. The caller, the real idiot here, breathes dumbly down the phone. The man can picture the caller’s mouth hanging open. He's just about ready to hang up.

“Was there a reason you wanted to speak to me, or are wasting my time?”

“No! I mean- of course there’s a reason I called you! Jesus Christ, I wouldn’t call you unless I had to. You know that.”

The man heaves a sigh down the phone. He waits for the caller to continue, growing impatient by the silence as the seconds draw on. 

"You still there, man?"

Time to disconnect.

“If you do not state your business, I will personally make sure that you do not-"

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa, man! It's me! You know me! It’s Matt, Matt Graver.”

Another long pause descends between the two men.

He remembers a Matt Graver. Sloppy, arrogant, has a reputation for weaselling his way other people's business. The name had cropped up while he’d worked inside the justice courts. The last he’d heard of this Matt Graver, he was working in Special Ops.

“Matt Graver.”

“Yes! The one and only.” Graver laughs jovially. The man grimaces, recalling the idiocy of the one and only  _Matt Graver_.

“Why are you calling me?”

“Other than to hear your dulcet tones late at night, I’ve come to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

The man closes his eyes. His wife and daughter smile back at him. He takes a moment to bask in their joy, feel their love, and forget about the world decaying around him. If he opens his eyes they’ll be gone, and he’ll be alone in a world that wants to slowly kill him.

Matt waits for his response. The man knows what he’ll say. Knows what he'll ask.

He opens his eyes.

“What do you need?”

Matt explains the plan. He rushes ahead of himself, excited by the ingenuity and magnitude of the operation. It's complicated, dangerous, and will take years to accomplish, if they’re lucky. He knows in the long run, if he lives, it’ll all be worth it.

“-oh baby, just you wait. When those sonsabitches see that the judge, jury and executioner is back, they’ll be crying for their mommas when we’re through with them. We’ll make them regret the day they bowed down to Fausto Alarcón-” Matt moves the receiver closer to his mouth, whispering now, bloodlust dripping “-we’ll make sure he pays for what he did.”

The man says nothing. His hand crushes the phone between his fingers, other hand splinters the armrest. He can feel it; blood pulsing under his hands as he crushes the life out of his enemy. Marvelling at the way his eyes turn red, roll back into his skull. Listening to the last breath that slithers out from his dead lips.

The man leaps out of the chair, snatches up his travel bag and throws his sparse belongings into it. He’ll call for a cab as soon as they’re finishing talking, drive through the night-

“There’s no need. I’ll be outside in ten minutes. Get your shit together and make sure you’re ready.” At that, Matt hangs up.

The man looks around the room and calmly resumes his packing, restraining his emotions.

He’s waited for this moment. To unleash the beast that’s been pacing, backwards and forwards, for so long. He’s killed before, but this is different. He’s sentenced more people to death than he can count, many of whom he can’t remember. Many he doesn’t want to remember. But now he understands. Now he understands the grief, the fury, the unquenchable need to repay his enemy in kind.

By the time Matt pulls up, the man has checked out and strolls over to the awaiting vehicle. The man behind the wheel looks the same as he ever did; pushed back hair, stubble, beaten up flipflops. All in all - he's a mess. Matt grins as the man slides into the seat beside him.

“You look like shit.”

A small smile breaks out on the man’s face.

“And you got old.”

Matt laughs and starts up the car.

“Listen-” Matt looks solemnly at the man, almost hesitant “-I just want to make sure that you’re up for this. I mean – I get it, if you’re not ready.”

Alejandro turns to the man beside him. He’s been face to face with many liars in his life. He knows when a man wants something, purely driven by personal gain, and when a man is offering something freely . The way how Matt looks at him tells Alejandro everything he needs to know; that his man, for all of his faults and vices, may become is greatest ally. Alejandro sees the darkness in his friend's eyes; it’s the same tiredness that encases him; keeps him up at night. Alejandro sees a reflection of himself, or a shadow of the man lost to flames.         

“Let’s do this.”

Matt’s eyes scan over him, as if trying to find any doubt behind those hooded eyes. What he finds isn’t doubt, but something else entirely. It’s animal; feral; ready to kill.

An easy smile breaks out across his face and he drives away. They leave behind the dilapidated motel, shrugging of its festering hopelessness. They accelerate into the desert, deeper into the night. They’ve got a long drive ahead of them.

Alejandro closes his eyes. His prey stares back at him. He observes the terror in those eyes, pleading, begging for mercy. He knows what he sees. But here, lost inside the pit of his mind, where death and despair reign, there are no second chances. Alejandro will strike when the time comes.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Thank you for taking the time to read my short piece. Setting out, I had no intentions of writing about Alejandro and his family tragedy, but the more involved I got in this prompt, I realised that his backstory might be something interesting to explore and here's the result! It might not be 100% accurate, but I just went with the flow and let him take control.
> 
> I would love to write more about these films, maybe exploring Kate and the aftermath of Juárez next.
> 
> I also want to mention that I wrote/edited this on my own, late at night, so I apologise if there are any mistakes!


End file.
